Dorchester District 2's math scores have been slipping on the elementary level. To forestall further deterioration, the district is taking action. Sunday's P & C carefully enumerates Superintendent Joe Pye's plans, developed at his request by a curriculum specialist. [See Dorchester 2 on a Mission to Change Math Instruction ]But when Pye made the statement that "no longer will teachers lecture for 40 minutes," every fact that had previously been presented was called into question. Lecturing for 40 minutes in a math classroom? Lecturing for 40 minutes in any high school classroom? You must be joking, Joe.
Remember "Show me the money"?
Well, "show me the teacher"!
If DD2's superintendent really believes that 40-minute lectures are being given in high school classrooms in his district, he is totally out of contact with reality. In fact, his brain has been left in the 19th century, not the 20th. No, that's not the likely problem. Instead, he has revealed himself to be an educrat, part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Maybe the problem is that third-grade teachers are spending more time on "dot plotting, mode, and range" than making sure that students are proficient in basic math skills such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division without a calculator.
Personally, I cringe every I see high school students dive for one to figure out what percentage 47 out of 50 is!
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2 comments:
Babbie,
I had been wondering about the Charleston math situation for sometime. Watching the bizarre destruction of math in WA state and Seattle over the last decade was painful, and yet still it appears that MG-J has managed to make things worse.
I thought how am I not hearing about Weapons of Math Destruction being dropped Charleston in your Courier. Perhaps Charleston is an Isle of Sanity in the Sea of Administrative Math Clowns.
No such luck for Charleston either.
Sorry to hear that but hardly surprised.
The publication of the National Math Advisory Panel report (NMAP)on March 13, 2008 brought a flurry of articles by some actual experts.
.... ( Experts in math are rare and reports from experts in math are rare - while math reports viewed as research are common)
Here is what I know 16,000 math studies according to NMAP member Sandra Stotsky are virtually worthless. Of the 13 math curricula developed with NSF funds and an additional 6 developed by publishers during the 1990s precisely ZERO have any valid research indicating evidence of efficacy.
Worse yet is the fact that there is little known about what makes for an effective math teacher. Best practices in Math are nothing but verbiage constantly spewed into the Edu-Cratic Expert-o-Sphere.
Good luck on fixing this mess. Washington State is where the front lines currently are in the battle for sanity against the Powerful Machine of Ignorance headed by the NSF's rogue department for grants to promote math lunacy.
For your reading pleasure I present my work at:
School Truth
The Math Underground
Keep up the fine work of trying to inform a far too trusting public.
Hopefully Core Knowledge is not dead yet. Despite the reports of its uselessness by the boosters of process oriented education reform. We are finally reaching the point where students have so little knowledge they have nothing to process.
My favorite book title:
School Reform: the Great American Brain Robbery
by Don Orlich
Sincerly,
Dan Dempsey
WA State Board of Education Math Advisory Panelist and a Math Teacher
I too have been watching and reading the discussion taking place in Seattle...in order to anticipate the debate we need to be having in Charleston about this very important issue. I hope the new Math and Science Charter School will be able take a lead for sanity by keeping their kids grounded in reality while preparing them to be competative within a global market that learned by doing instead of just theory. Thanks, Dan Dempsey, for keeping us on your radar screen. We in Charleston need all the help and objective view points we can get.
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